Adani US indictment: Power deals took 18 months and 'incentives' to state officials, says SEC

NEW DELHI: The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint in a New York court has said that Solar Energy Corporation of India had hoped to sign the power purchase agreement within 90 days of issuing letters of award to Adani Green and Azure Power in June 2020, but the high tariffs quoted by the companies resulted in the deals taking over 18 months to execute. And, even this was possible after Adani allegedly "substantially increased" the "incentives" to state govt officials.

The complaint suggested that officials in Odisha may have been the first to receive bribes, with the state signing a PSA in July 2021 after "a payment equal to hundreds of thousands of dollars was paid or promised to govt officials".

By Dec 1 2021, SECI had entered into PSAs with discoms in at least four states, it said. American agencies, SEC and department of justice have alleged that bribes were also paid to officials in Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh and J&K.

While the two companies at the centre of the bribery scandal - Adani Green and Azure Power - were awarded the letter of award by June 2020, SECI was unable to find state discoms willing to buy power from the two companies as the prices were "too high", more so due to "downward pressure on solar energy prices" in India.

In late 2020 and early 2021, Sagar Adani, who is an accused with his uncle Gautam Adani, the chairman of the ports-to-power conglomerate, communicated with others, including Azure executives, about the need to "pressure and incentivise" states, SEC alleged.

By June 2021, Azure had publicly acknowledged the problems. "Soon thereafter, Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani increased the pressure on Indian state govt officials. Through their personal involvement and promises to pay or payment of a total of hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes to them, the defendants finally obtained agreements from some discoms to enter into power supply agreements (PSA) with SECI," the complaint alleged.

In Aug 2021, Gautam Adani met the then Andhra Pradesh chief minister (Jagan Mohan Reddy was in office at that time, although the complaint does not name anyone). SEC has alleged that around Rs 1,750 crore, out of the total payouts of Rs 2,029 crore, was made to officials in that state, which agreed to buy 7,000MW in the first phase.

On Thursday, the Adani Group had dismissed the charges as baseless. Adani Green and Azure were beneficiaries of the first set of production-linked incentive schemes, where they agreed to set up generation capacity of 8GW and 4GW, respectively. It came with the rider that they had to also produce solar cells and modules domestically. Thanks to participation in SECI contract, Adani Green, which had one power project of 20MW capacity, which rose to 2GW by 2018-end, managed to boost renewable power capacity to 10GW by 2022. SEC and DoJ alleged, as part of deal with Azure Power executives to recover one-third of bribes paid, it managed to transfer 2.3GW capacity to itself.